por In the technological world, System monitoring is the process in which process failures are detected and avoided.That is, a well-monitored application or program should be designed to identify precursors or indicators of a failure in time. This will allow you to act before the failure occurs.
This process also takes care of track system status, as well as its infrastructure and existing subsystems, to ensure that they are reliable, stable and can perform their functions normally.
To achieve the objectives of this tool, you first need to have a good system or software monitoring to focus your efforts on memory, processes, storage and other relevant program information. In addition, monitoring requires certain data displayed in graphs to be able to interpret them.
Among the elements that can be monitored include the availability, latency, stability of the backend and the user experienceas well as finances.
Key concepts in monitoring
To understand the monitoring process, it is necessary to understand certain relevant terms:
Measurement
This term refers to the data that the tool returns, that is, the set of base information that will be analyzed and interpreted to establish the system state of a program or application.
Regarding its structure, it will depend on the type of data that the system returns; So, for example, the returned data could look like this: 0, 15, -5, «5.4.3».
Metrics
The metric is defined as the measurement along with the data name, a date and a time stamp either timestap. It can be associated with a specific component of the system, such as its performance or availability, among others. In addition, it facilitates continuous improvement and assertive decision making.
Measurement frequency
This tool indicates how often the metrics are being taken. The measurement frequency will depend on the type of metric that the program, application or system system is working with. software.
Monitoring perspective
Indicates the monitoring tool location. This perspective can be found within the system structure, outside it, or be a mixed element. In addition to this, you should keep in mind that certain metrics may vary depending on the perspective.
Uses of monitoring
The data derived from the monitoring process in a program can be used for different actions:
Display
This data generates visualizations or dashboards that allow you to see on the screen the behavior of the system structure, that is, it makes it easier to have multiple metrics on a single screen. The dashboards They are easy to understand elements, they help make data more accessible and enable the development of more efficient reports.
Trends
For their part, trends refer to the direction of the series of measurements in a metric, that is, its analysis is used to detect if any metric is changing behavior. Indicates whether to add or decrease the load of a metric; In addition, it is responsible for establishing if any type of query is generating a problem.
Alerts
The alerts They allow you to draw the user’s attention to situations that may lead to failures. for the systems. Thus, for example, a type of alert occurs once a possible failure in a system is identified, as it will automatically send an email. Other channels like Telegram, Slack or even chats can work to send an alert.
Monitoring users
This tool It is mainly used by operations teams, who will use this strategy to detect errors and try to resolve them before they occur. In the same way, QA or certification teamswho are located between the operation team and clients, seek to use monitoring to analyze trends and modify or implement new versions of software with recent changes and improved elements so that a given application works more efficiently.
For their part, the managers management They seek to exercise control over the ability to predict the use of resources, that is, they have the possibility of observing the changes that have occurred in the use of infrastructure resources and use that information to be able to plan.
Other users of this tool are product managers, those who are interested in metric information to know how much their business is selling or how many views or errors they are having, among others.
Advantages of systems monitoring
Monitoring and its strategy of early notification of errors that may occur in the program represent a great advantage for the operating system, because saves time and costsas well as increasing customer satisfaction.
Besides, allows you to know the availability status of the equipment and directly detect the origin of a possible incident.
What is the next step?
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